If you are considering having a home built to order there are a few things that you need to take into consideration.

Quite obviously you want a reputable builder with many years of experience – for example, Riverview Custom Homes is a respected local company – and one that you can be certain won’t let you down three quarters of the way through the project.

It makes sense to talk to friends or relatives who have had a custom-built home; they may be able to recommend a good company, or even steer you away from another with which they have had a bad experience. However, the majority of people will never have a custom-built home so you may well not have relatives or friends with any experience.

You should certainly check if a potential builder is a member of any organizations – and if so, which ones. Local real estate agents may also have connections with builders. It is well worth asking them.

If you look through the real estate listings of your local newspaper you should find some information on local developers and the type of homes they are building. Some of the better known ones include Riverview Custom Homes; it is always sound advice to opt for businesses with a decent track record.

When you have a short list of builders you should ask them if they can show you testimonials and give you the addresses of properties they have recently built so that, at the very least, you can drive by and have a look at them.

It is a very good idea to drive/walk by on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Often you will find that the owners are outside doing chores. If you can get talking to them, explaining that you are considering having a property built by the same building company, you will often find that you will get a wealth of information that you could obtain nowhere else.

If they are happy they will almost certainly tell you, and if they are not it’s a pretty good bet that they will tell you that as well.

It’s always worth taking a notebook with you. You won’t necessarily remember everything afterwards, but if you have a few notes written down it will help later on.

Among other local custom home builders, Riverview Custom Homes not only have a wealth of experience, but they make much of their warranties. Many builders give a ten year warranty, but you may find that after the first year or two, they are, in fact, very limited, if you read the small print.

Where Riverview Custom Homes are concerned they make a great point of their warranty in their initial sales literature. This gives you confidence that they will stand by what they say and that, if, by chance, anything does go wrong they will fix it even if the house is nine years and eleven months old.

Better still, if you think about it, is that they themselves have confidence in the homes they build because – after all – they don’t want any problems to arise any more than you do.